Andrew: 0:00

I was just gonna hang out alone in the mountains, and I had this huge transistor radio with me for company. I got up to Yates and for some reason I, freaked out the actual solitude was terrifying. and I, I remember, at nighttime, I had the radio on full blast, to keep away the demons

Speaker: 0:24

Kiro and welcome to the Tramping Life, a podcast about hiking in outro New Zealand, or as we call it here, tramping. I'm jt, and in each episode I chat with people who share passion for exploring this incredible country. We'll hear about the tracks they love, the huts they return to, the lessons they've learned, and what keeps them heading back into the bush.

Jonty: 0:44

My guest today is Andrew Les, founder of Perm and Star of the Huts, a new film highlighting the role he played in protecting and restoring New Zealand's Hu network. His passion for the mountains is matched by his commitment to ensuring future generations can enjoy them, and I'm delighted to welcome him to the podcast, Kira.

Andrew: 1:01

Thank you j.

Jonty: 1:02

Pleasure to have you on board. So I'd like to start at the beginning. I'm interested in what are some of your earliest memories of the outdoors?

Andrew: 1:10

My family were working class. My father came out from Scotland in the fifties and my mother was a Kiwi, so they were working class kiwis and we moved to the west coast when I was about six or seven years old. So they were definitely not outdoor people in any kind of. Sense or form. So for me, the mountains were something I saw out of the window. You're always looking at this magnificent stretch of Alps, and as a kid, I was always fascinated. Buy Them. I couldn't keep my eyes off them. So I'd, gaze out of the classroom window, and further on down the track I'd get maps and things look at all the names and there was some kind of pool it wasn't until I attended Westland High School. There were about 450 people and kids in that school, and there was a small group of us, probably half a dozen that went into the hills and in the beginning that was mostly led by Lou Sanson and Lou got into the hills because of his mother, Allison. She was a keen outdoor person and tramp climber. And she encouraged us. To go into the hills, we had at a very early stage, early seventies, we had 15 or 16 year olds running around this old Forest Service network on their own. So we were trusted and we would just let go. I'm sure that would be frowned upon these days from a health and safety perspective. But The rest of our parents and the majority of the kids at the school just weren't interested in the outdoors. I think for a lot of them, it was a place you could go, if you wanted to hunt or get something, but, just to go there and walk around and dream and just enjoy the beauty of the place. It was a bit uncool then. That's how it started. And of course back at the beginning, we all had these old. 3 0 3 Lee Enfield. Based on that premise, you had to go into the, to the mounts to do something, kill something, extract something. And the deer were very generous in those days. They'd walk out in front of us on the tracks and, fall over. But I realized quite quickly, I was a lousy hunter and, I thought if I get rid of this bloody heavy rifle, I can carry a bit more food and get a bit further into the back country. That's how it started for me.

Jonty: 3:07

Did you have any, learning experiences, being in the bush that young,

Andrew: 3:11

My first tramp, I was 15 and I went with Lou and a couple of others and at 15 years old, I was still very small. And I had a lot of borrowed gear and we went up the Sticks Valley on, around Easter, I think it was about 1972, so I was 15 and I had a hell of a time getting up that valley. I was small and weedy and the weather wasn't great. it was pissing down I had too much in my pack, all kinds of junk, and about three quarters of the way up, I was just, I was just crapping out. I was crying and the guys took a bit of my gear. they were quite nice doing that. And we got to grassy flats. Hu. And there were a couple of colors. Still at that early stage, probably the last of the colors there. And they, they had the fire going and they had a brew up and stuff like that. Very quickly we were warm and cozy and the next day we continued up over stick saddle and into the hurrah and went up to Browning Pass. So I got through that initial kind of misery hump. I think the second and third days are, I was just humming along. It was a very powerful experience for me. And, I could have maybe if it had gone totally pear-shaped, had a very bad experience and never gone back in there. But, I guess I broke through some kind of barrier and there you were. you're in this kind of Magic mountain land.

Jonty: 4:18

So were you the instigator or was Lou the instigator?

Andrew: 4:21

Lou was the ringleader there. He was, quite a high energy person. he's a great organizer. So in the beginning, he was key at, getting me started, it wasn't very long before. You know, I was up and flying. I could Do stuff on my own. I guess another formative experience was there was a yearning in me to get into solo tramps, to get up there and just, experience the rawness and the isolation of being alone in the wilderness. my first solo trip was. Possibly after my first year of university, I came back to the coast for summer 1976 or 77, and I did this solo trip up, to Yates Ridge, which is an alpine hut. I was just gonna hang out alone in the mountains, but I had all kinds of junk again, and I had this huge transistor radio with me for company. I got up to Yates and for some reason I, freaked out the actual solitude was terrifying. and I, I remember, at nighttime, I had the radio on full blast, to keep away the demons The internal ones as well as whatever was lurking outside the door. And yeah, it was totally overwhelming. And the next day I just hightailed it out of the valley. I couldn't handle it. But that yearning to go back in and again, pushed through that barrier, whatever it was, it's mostly your own stuff. And experience that solitude again. So I kept going back, But it wasn't until I came back from overseas, I'd been traveling a fair bit on my own and I'd gotten through that kind of phase of wanting it, but not being able to handle it.

Jonty: 5:46

So you prefer the solo or the group, or you've always done a bit of a mixer over time.

Andrew: 5:49

I like a mix, but I like to get out there on my own and do a decent epic once a year. Push the boundaries, the physical, the psychological boundaries, and, get into some really remote spaces.

Jonty: 6:01

So what are your boundaries like to you? What would be an ambitious trip?'cause everybody's got their different experience and abilities.

Andrew: 6:06

Previously in the past they were purely psychological ones. Tramping is an interesting thing. you think it's purely physical. It's, you're in touch with nature. But it's probably 80% psychological, you're dealing with the discomfort you're dealing with, The wildness, which kind of reduces you to, just an insignificant little. ant on the face of the earth. There's all sorts of interesting processes that going on up there. And of course you've got your own internal baggage, the inherited crap and trauma of, family and generations and things like that, that you tend to end up processing as well, your own. Personal stuff when you're up there. So it can be very therapeutic or, in the case of my first solo tramp, it can just be overpowering. So yeah, initially psychological, but once I'd got through that, the barrier now is physical because I'm 68 and I'm still trying to do stuff that I was doing when I was 30, and I'm still hanging out with very fit types that are a lot younger than me. Coming up against, Those barriers. Now is an interesting one for me. I'm having to, look at things like knees and the knees are starting to play up, but I, I've had a very good run and in comparison with a lot of my contemporaries, I'm still, in terms of fitness, a bit of a freak. But, there's a best Buy date to all of this. So it's gonna be a physical one, but it's also gonna be a kind of a letting go thing as. I, I accept some age related limitations, but I'm, I'm still doing the hard stuff. We'll see how long I can do it before something, craps out badly.

Jonty: 7:26

I'm hoping your pack's a bit lighter these days. Are you going for the whole kind, lightweight approach or no?

Andrew: 7:30

I'm terrible, I'm stubborn. My, my partner says I should do stretching exercises, I refuse to do stretching exercises. I refuse to take walking poles. I refuse to chuck stuff outta my pack, but, the chickens are coming home to roost. I'm gonna consult a few lightweight friends and start looking at, cutting down, getting rid of a few of those. Bits and pieces that I think I can't do without. We'll see. You can only get the weight down so far.

Jonty: 7:54

And are you going back to places you've been before or there still new places you wanna go and explore?

Andrew: 7:59

Both. I'm in a kind of a reactive phase of my life now, so people call me up, they wanna do trips, they wanna do projects, and I, they're often in places where I've been, many times and they often say aren't you a bit sick of going back into these places? But I'm not, it's always great to revisit them. I don't need to. Keep accumulating new. for me, the whole hut bagging thing is a bit absurd. I've got a lot of huts that I like. I can just keep going back to them or alternatively I can go to a new one. I do still go to new places but mostly that's driven by other people'cause I'm lazy. if less to my own devices, I, I live in the Ruta, you know, I'm a half an hour drive from the mountains. I'll just jump in my car and. Head back into familiar territory. Someone will ring me up and say, you want to go down and do this, or this. And I'll always say yes.

Jonty: 8:42

Now, both Lou and Rob talked about one of their most epic tricks being out to ivory Lake Hut. And I'm assuming that's one you've been to a few times. So I'm interested in, how has that experience changed? Because I guess in the last few years it's become quite an iconic kind of bagger hu but also over the decades with climate change and the glacier, the experience has changed. So I'd be interested to get your perspectives on that, because you've probably been there. As many times as anybody. I'm assuming.

Andrew: 9:07

No, I haven't been there a lot, but I have been there a few times and the first trip in there was in 1976, again with Lou Sson and another friend. at that stage, Trevor and His hydrological people still had all the gear in the shed up there, including a rowboat. So we were able to go out rowing on Ivory Lake, and at that stage the glacier came right down into the lake. over the years I've seen it shrink back, almost to the size of a postage stamp on the side of the mountain. It's just a sticky bit of ice now. a lot of people in my street, are a bit, reticent about accepting the validity of climate change, but I'll often say I've been in the mountains all my life and, I've seen. The incredibly rapid changes, the small glaciers shrinking, and further up in the catchments, the side creeks and upper catchments are just filling up with millions of tons of gravel from the extreme weathers events. So things are changing up there. But yeah, no, the last time I was in an ivory was probably a couple of years back, yeah, it's a special place. It gets hammered a bit. in the kind of late summer, autumn season. but relatively speaking still a remote hut.

Jonty: 10:06

And have you found, the tracks to the huts? There's the maintenance component, but also that climate change component you talked about and you're finding that the tracks, I guess there's more slips or things are getting more difficult or they're getting easier'cause we're getting better at maintenance.

Andrew: 10:20

The kind of tracks we look after are rudimentary, so if there's a slip, if doc's got a great walk have to spend millions of dollars, putting a detour around it or stabilizing it or putting another bench on it. if there's a slip on one of the tracks, we maintain, we'll just. Walk across it basically. Bench will form at some stage or we'll cut a detour around it. if there's a big windfall, rather than chop the trees up. we'll just, detour the track around the windfall. So for us, there's a kind of inherent instability in the mountains. it's hard to say, whether becoming more frequent and more extreme, but it's always been rough and unstable up there. We've always had to cope with, you know, it's, it's howling a gale here at the moment. I suspect, a few of our tracks are gonna have some big trees over them when we go and visit next time. that just goes with the territory. so it, hasn't impacted our work very much at all, because of the type of tracks we work on.

Jonty: 11:10

Yeah, that makes sense. So that's a good segue into Permac.'cause as you mentioned, they're doing a lot of track maintenance and I'll be interested in the origin story

Andrew: 11:19

You've gotta look at where it started and or the reasons why it started. we had this fantastic network of and tracks that were put in initially by Internal Affairs and then later by the Forest Service for animal control work. when, helicopter Venison recovery came in, that was a far more effective way of controlling deer, so. In very short order. the colors were all pulled out and you had this amazing network, that was in the early seventies and Was still maintained by the Forest Service until it switched over to in 87. Doc had a different philosophy, but they also had a much smaller budget and it wasn't possible for them to keep this network up to, up to scratch. So their response was a kind of a managerial accounting thing. the huts were all on their asset register, they're listed as capital assets, which is really silly for. Little tin shacks in the mountains, but it was costing money to have these huts sitting there. their approach was to rationalize this and from an accounting perspective, it was easy to say well, let's just get rid of these things. so they did a review in 2003 and consigned huts to various categories, maintain, minimal, maintain remove. So remove was obvious, minimal maintain was removed by stealth. So because the huts would gradually run down. But it took a while for this to kind of dawn on me. it was becoming apparent by the late nineties that, you know, a lot of the tracks were getting overgrown. a lot of the huts were running down. It was a lack of information. doc went through multiple restructures and they got rid of a lot of their old staff that had that kind of experience and knowledge. So people stopped going to these places. But back in the nineties, I was still like a lot of people, we'd had this laid on for us for decades. Like a lot of people, I was just expecting some higher power to come along and, come on Doc, come and cut these bloody tracks. That's what we pay taxes for. But there was a slow realization that this wasn't gonna happen. And there were a few huts out there that had been adopted informally by people. They just went in and looked after them. One was Newton Creek Hut, which was kept, maintained in great condition by a psychiatric nurse, Alan Re who loved Blue Ducks. And he went up there to study them. Mark Crompton was a meteorologist. he adopted, Browning range bivy and put a library in there and did all sorts of nice little embellishments. And John dainty of, Invercargill, he was looking after Griffin Creek hut and I thought, this is pretty inspirational. I might adopt a few huts too, but, one day I just had the idea, what I might do is just start up a website and put all these huts on there. You know, Just show people they're in stunning locations. Great eye candy. Tell people how to get to them. And also my idea was this is a website. We can tell'em, what's wrong with the hut? They might need a window fixing and we can start leaving a few tools and people can start doing all those little minor repairs to keep the huts weather tight. now the people that, it was an organization called online groups, the people that helped me. I built the website, said we've got this kind of online group component. Why don't you add that? I thought, oh, yeah, that's a good idea because you used to see all these names in the huts. There'd be years apart. But it was the same people. You never met them because the visits were so infrequent. But I thought we have this little, online group and the website, some of these people might come out of the woodwork. And so the guy, Simon Guernsey, who helped me. With the website. He said what are we gonna call it? I said, I don't know. He said, why don't you call it Perla? I said, yeah, okay. And for people that don't know Perla is the Venetian blind material, that little white strips of Venetian blind, but the Forest Service used to, use for marking their tracks. So that's what happened. And it basically worked a charm, the website took off. People loved it. And the online group, it worked in getting all of these people, from various parts of the country out of the woodwork. Within a very short period of time, we had this amazing little kind of collective of passionate. Hardened outdoor types, but just wanted to roll their sleeves up. But at that stage, we had no formal arrangements with Doc and we didn't at that stage, the department wasn't that used to dealing with, having members of the community doing things on the public conservation, estate. So we thought initially they're just gonna say no. So that kind of started to dance with Doc. And fortunately, doc Hoer, we had some people that lived there. They lived on the coast. they used the networks and they were sympathetic. So that was good because they could start from their end to kinda look at how we could do this. if it had happened in another conservancy, we would've been shut down and threatened with prosecution possibly. but on the coast, We just started, dancing with Doc, you could call it that. And there are two docs, basically. You've got your field workers that were sympathetic and you've got the bureaucracy further up, which, that process focused, that paranoia, risk averse, they're full of people that don't have a real kind of connection with the land and they're just there to make life hell for people. We had to deal with that doc. and fortunately we had some intermediaries at the, Hoka ticker end of things that kind of helped figure out a way that we could do this and, that it was gonna satisfy the department. so that was, looking at the early two thousands, we did our first crack cutting project as Perla in 2005 in the Kotahi Valley. It just went on from there. And of course it gained a huge amount of momentum and a lot of other things spun off from that. So it served as an early model for volunteer input in the high country. It was adopted on the coast and then gradually pushed. And in other areas. And at that stage we had a kind of a double whammy. We had Lou Anson as CEO. So we had our greatest ally at the top, and we had friends at the bottom. So all we were really dealing with was this kind of obstructive. Bureaucratic middle tier. And Lou would try and get around it from the top and our fixes and dock and Hoka would try and get around it from the bottom. In that we achieved considerable movement and success. I think in 2013, Lou said there'd be no more hut removals because in that review. a lot of the huts they'd put down for removal, they started removing in 2006, so that was stopped and then we could focus on the minimally maintained huts and start doing them up. And that kind of morphed into bigger organizations like Back Country Trust, which, they can operate on a far larger scale and, they're far more effective at doing more comprehensive maintenance and stuff like that.

Jonty: 17:24

So perm came first and then that inspired the backcountry trust, which then had a national kind of scope.

Andrew: 17:30

It grew. In 2013, I think we got some seeding funding from Doc$10,000. And that was, the first acknowledgement that, we were doing something of value that that doc considered of value because the outdoor public were already well behind us. We had people like Rob Brown who were early people, but they. Also were able to operate at a higher level at a political and bureaucratic level and talk to people, pull strings what came out of that was something called the High Country Consortium, which was a sort of an experiment in having an autonomous NGO, if you like, or group that was doing this work, but had. Funding coming through from Doc and doc loved to micromanage, so there was some kind of oversight and management there from Doc it was a way of formalizing it you had a model that could work on much larger scales. we were just a small group doing sort of ad hoc stuff, this allowed a greater level of organization. it was just a kind of natural evolution really. But it all came about because it was the right time to do that. There were the right people. I think if it had happened earlier, it would've flopped. I dunno if it hadn't happened with Perla, I think maybe someone else would've done it. Because Kiwis love their huts. And I don't think, if we weren't doing anything that, that people would've just sat back and watched, docs start removing huts all over the place, but, we're back at that place again. The accounting people in Docker presenting these kind of woeful stats to the government saying, we can't look after a third of our huts. We're gonna have to do this and that. Righty rah. It's pure bullshit. The huts are fine. And those minimal maintenance huts, the low use huts are in better shape than they've ever been. And, we're gonna keep'em that way. They're not gonna be lost. But there's this kind of narrative that comes outta doc head office that, you know, oh we don't have enough money. We've been doing stuff on a shoestring and we're far more cost effective. So I think for the remote and low use huts it's better that the community has the bulk of the input and doc okay. it's on the doc estate, but they need to step back a bit and trust. Can come up with solutions for this.

Jonty: 19:34

Do you think that's a sustainable solution do you think new generations may not be willing or able to volunteer as much time and effort?

Andrew: 19:40

I think it's cyclic. We do tend to be in the older age demographic graphic, and it kind of suits to be retired because we're working around weather windows and it's very hard to organize a trip on the West coast, and get the, weather to cooperate as well. Quite often, we're looking at windows. We're making, more spontaneous decisions to go and do a trip and people with. Job and family commitments, you find it harder. But we have been doing really well recently. We've got a whole new crop of young people coming in and getting keen. so it may be that we can sustain it, but ultimately what will happen, even if, we fizzle out. Is that, at some point the tracks will start overgrowing again. The huts will still be in pretty good shape because they've really been done up to quite high standards. So I think a lot of them will be fine for 50 or 60 years now. But a track on the West coast will overgrow in three, five years. If we do fizzle out, Things will just slowly deteriorate for a while and then somebody will get pissed off and think, come on, Perala. Why aren't you cutting the tracks? This is the old entitlement thing, people think, oh, permeates gonna cut the tracks now, but they don't get it, I keep telling people, permeate is not actually a group. it's more of an idea. It's more of a paradigm, it's a kind of an empowerment model. these are your tracks, these are your huts. They're not docs Doc have this kind of legal ownership of them, but really they're just guardians. Getting that shift of consciousness I think is the most important thing. But I think, we haven't been completely successful in that. We've just replaced Dock as as Oh yeah, yeah. Per are looking after these tracks. that was not our intention. Our intention was to get every T traer to to travel with a little pair of Loper or something and just clean and tidy stuff. That's all you need to do on these tracks to keep them open. if everybody was doing a little bit of that, we'd be able to keep these networks open and it is changing a little bit. there is a little bit of a shift there in consciousness. there are people that do go tramping with loppers and little hand saws now

Jonty: 21:30

There's an excellent documentary that came out earlier this year, which tells that kind of story. And I guess that's another really good way of raising awareness that the tracks don't just maintain themselves. It does require quite a lot of effort to do that. So how did Huts come about?

Andrew: 21:43

Liam Hall is my partner's son. And he's based in Canada, but he comes out to New Zealand every now and again. I've known Liam since he was, 12 or 13 years old. So he's watched us as we, come and go in the mountains. He is not a great tramping buff himself. He did a few tramps and then he got sick of it at a certain age, like a lot of adolescents do. But he's been conscious, he been there while we were doing this stuff. and, his passion is making, making films. One day he said well, you know, I think we've got a really good story here. and that basically led to him, Wanting to give it a go to put that story together. But it was his full first length documentary, so it was a huge learning curve for him. He came out from Canada in March 23 for a month or so. And, we took him around all the various. People that we could link up with that were prominent in the movement that featured in it. And we were fortunate enough to be able to join in on a couple of Back Country Trust rebuilds. One of top, top older OG bivy in the Hur and one of Duns Creek in the typo. So he was able to get footage of those two projects and talk to a lot of people that were involved with Perla from the get go. So that was great. And, he spent about 800 hours of his own time putting all that footage together. So it was a big learning curve for him. But it turned out well in the end. and it got a really good reception when it, premiered at the Mountain Film Festival in Monica this year. We had our first showing. public showing at Hoka last week. So that, was a good turnout for that. and there's gonna be screenings in Christchurch and Nelson when we get a bit more organized. Yeah. So it will be available to the wider public, as time goes on.

Jonty: 23:19

Yeah, I look forward to to seeing it. I also understand that you are an artist.

Andrew: 23:23

I paint, I dunno if I'm an artist, but I paint and it's something that I struggle with to motivate to do. I'm not prolific, but, I see things when I'm tramping, The light, the colors, the intensity of the air and the views in the high country. And I take photographs of them. I just look at things and think, oh yeah, that'll make a nice watercolor one day. and when I get home, I'll. Try and figure out multiple ways of avoiding painting. I have a whole list of procrastination and avoidance tasks, like weeding the garden and then it rains and it rains. And I run out of avoidance tasks and I think, okay, I better go and do some painting. So there's a bit of a motivation hump there. Not a bit of one a considerable one. So yeah, I get there occasionally, but, it's not a production line by any means.

Jonty: 24:07

You'll probably asked this question a few times, but what are your favorite huts?

Andrew: 24:10

All of them. Yeah. What are your

Jonty: 24:12

least favorite huts? Do you have any huts where you're like I don't, we're not gonna stay there again,

Andrew: 24:16

I like rodent huts Les.'cause, they have a different energy. They have a manky energy. They're not looked after as well, yeah, there are some huts cited in pretty dumb places. They're cold. They don't get much sun. But, they all have their charm. But, some of the huts, I revisit. A lot and love a lot, places like Frisco and the Hoka Tika, I'm looking after Serpentine Hut, which isn't, an incredibly spectacular site, but it's amazingly remote and, the canyons in the Hoka Tika are fantastic. So I've grown to, like serpentine hut a lot. Places like Mullin's Basin, I like the huts that are semi sub alpine up the hanging valleys, where you've got that wonderful mix of tussic flats and beautiful alpine scrub, little creeks and waterfalls. they're good places to hang out, but, having said that, everywhere is pretty good. Now,

Jonty: 25:03

obviously, the West Coast is your passion and your love and your home, but are there other areas that you've tramped around New Zealand that, and you have a special place in your heart or that you particularly enjoyed?

Andrew: 25:12

Oh, Southwestern, I, you know, I like Fjord land and that's an area I've really only scratched the surface down there. And, Canterbury has its charms. I don't like the Long River Valley Trudges, but. there's some lovely country up there. once you're, you've done obligatory 25 kilometer riverbed walk. I've done a bit in the kaikos and ka rangi. They've all got something. But yeah, I have to say that I'm still heavily biased. Towards the West coast particularly the beach gap. it's a unique type of forest vegetation, don't have the kind of the beach monocultures. You have very kind of diverse, interesting forest types.

Jonty: 25:47

So if people haven't done much on the West Coast, where would you recommend

Andrew: 25:51

it depends on their level of experience. Of course, I don't wanna send anybody to their death. But, it could be character building. But I think, the, a valley like the Taha is really a cool place to start.'cause it's a little valley. It's like a pocket valley, but it's got everything in it and it's got a lot of huts, it's. Your main valley huts and it's got a, a kind of a sprinkling of tops, huts, and bies around it. It's, there are heaps of choices in there and just about every kind of terrain I get lots of inquiries about Ivory Lake. People wanting to go to Ivory Lake, who are totally unsuitable, un suited, inexperienced, and I spend a hell of a lot of time trying to actually, dissuade people from doing that. And what I'll often do if they haven't done a lot of that kind of tramping I'll say, look, try the Torah row first. It's, it's got a fairly easy walk to the first hut. The walk up to the top hut is actually quite challenging. You've got a bit of everything there. It's not on the same scale as the Waha, but it's, you get a taste of that and if you like that, then you know, you can build up, I think people in general don't like being told that, they're not up for something. They think, oh yeah, I've done this and that and, or I'm experienced in the Alaskan wilderness so all those skills are transferable to the west coast. I took some journalists from American backpacker up to Ivory Lake some years back. And that was quite challenging for them. and two of the photographers were quite gung-ho mountaineers, but they were definitely outta their comfort zone in a few places. And I guess their main observation was that we've passed through so many different types of landscapes, from the mountains to the sea within such a short distance. They said, we've got all of this in the states, but each of these features is in a different state in New Zealand that they're all plump together, you get them all a kind of a single experience, if you like. And that's quite unique. Plus you've got all these amazing little huts there, which, you don't have in most parts of the world. So that's, it's something very special. That's worth sharing and encouraging people to get into.

Jonty: 27:41

What trips do you have planned next?

Andrew: 27:43

I was supposed to be going to Brass Monkey Biff with a couple of friends next weekend, but I can already see it's not gonna happen. We've got this amazing unsettled spring weather pattern, which will probably last right through to February. Now this is a classic West Coast spring. It's very unsettled. You don't get the big windows. There's a BCT project to help fix up Mount Brown Hut, which I've volunteered to, to go and help do a bit of track work on in October. They work around a fixed window, so you have a very high Cancellation rate with projects that have a fixed time here, it's better to be living here and, just to be able to go on the drop of a hat. but aside from that, no. I just pot around here. there'll be a few front country tracks that I might go and tidy up. Some friends, have got other projects. Jeff Spearpoint is working on Tunnel Creek. he's invited me down to do that at some point. if it happens at all places like the Roaring Billy, so other people, from that kind of collective that we started are still active and quite often I'm helping out do stuff with them. And I've got a few friends that are inviting me on tramps quite regularly so that tends to fill up the diary.

Jonty: 28:47

Wonderful. that's quite a good way to live your life.

Andrew: 28:49

You can make it this far with your legs intact, then, it's a good time of life.

Jonty: 28:53

Surely you'll start using hiking poles or are you resistant?

Andrew: 28:56

A friend has lent me a pole. She heard about my knee. there's a pole sitting in the back door alcove that, I'm looking at. I might take it on a trip just in case, other friends of the same age are giving me. Often conflicting advice on painkillers, which is the best one. Oh no, you should try this. No, try this. It's slow release. It's there are various ways apparently of running yourself into the ground.

Speaker: 29:18

Thank you so much for listening to the Tramping life. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please follow the podcast in whatever app you use. Tell a friend about it and consider leaving a rating or a review. It really helps more people discover the show. you have any questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you. Drop me an email at the tramping life, one word@gmail.com.